21st century literature

Lesley Lebkowicz, The Petrov poems (Review)

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Canberra poet Lesley Lebkowicz has made a couple of brief appearances in my blog: first in my post on The invisible thread anthology, and then when she won this year’s ACT Poetry Award. I was consequently more than happy to accept for review her latest book, The Petrov poems.

English: Evdokia Petrova at Mascot Airport, Sy...

Evdokia being escorted by two Russian diplomatic couriers to a plane at Mascot Airport, Sydney (Presumed Public Domain, from NAA, via Wikipedia)

It’s intriguing that nearly 60 years after the events, we are still interested in the Petrovs. In fact, I have written about them before, in my review of Andrew Croome’s historical novel, Document Z. Most Australians will know who they are, but for those global readers here who don’t, the Petrovs were a Russian couple who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra in the early 1950s. Vladimir (Volodya), Third Secretary, and his wife Evdokia (Dusya) were both Soviet intelligence officers (or, to put it baldly, spies). They defected in 1954. The defection was particularly interesting because Vladimir defected first, and Evdokia two weeks later at the airport in Darwin after some dramatic scenes at Sydney’s Mascot airport.

At first glance, The Petrov poems looks like a collection of poems but in fact it is a verse novel, albeit one comprising many short individually-titled poems. These poems are organised into four “chapters”: Part 1, Volodya defects; Part 2, Dusya defects; Part 3, The Petrovs at Palm Beach; and Part 4, The Petrovs in Melbourne.

I must admit that I wondered, initially, why Lebkowicz had decided to write about the Petrovs, given that they have already been picked over in novels, non-fiction, theatre, and television. But, as soon as I started reading it, I could see why. Lebkowicz gets into the heart of these two characters, bringing them back to ordinary human beings who were caught up in something that was both of and not of their own making. It is a rather pathetic story. There are no heroes here – and yet, as happens with these sorts of things, it captured the world’s attention for a short time.

Now, before I comment specifically on this book, I’d like to quote another Canberra poet Paul Hetherington from an interview with Nigel Featherstone in the online literary journal Verity La:

One of the ways I recognise the poetic is when I find works in which language is condensed, ramifying, polysemous and unparaphraseable. Part of what I wish to do when writing poems is to make works that speak in such ways – but to do so without resorting to any kind of trickery or artificial obscurity.

While I wouldn’t use words like “ramifying” and “polysemous”, and while we can paraphrase the ideas to a degree, this is pretty much what Lebkowicz achieves in The Petrov poems. In just 80 pages or so she manages to not only tell the story of their lives but get to the nub of their hearts and psyches – as much, anyhow, as anyone can do for another person. We learn that Volodya is not succeeding at spying:

He wants to succeed but stumbles. Failure
follows him like iron torn from a roof and
rattled along the wind.
(from “Glass I”)

We learn that he loves Dusya (“Dusya is his place in the world”), but that he loves booze, his dog and prostitutes more. He seems weak, but he’s a man struggling. With Stalin’s death and the arrest of his boss, he fears reprisals when he returns to Moscow. Here he is at the moment of defecting (which he does, after disagreements on the subject, without telling Dusya):

Once again he’s going to be wrenched from the soil.
He remembers his father – struck by lightning, buried up to his neck
by foolish men, and dying in the freezing night.
Then chaos and not enough food. Uprooting a full-grown plant
is no easy thing: so many roots
are wound through the earth. He mutters the Russian words
for sadness and home and ruffles his Alsatian’s fur.
(from “Loss”)

Dusya, on the other hand, is a stronger character, but she has suffered severe losses in her life, including her first love and her daughter:

This is something Dusya does not allow herself to think: how her
life might have been if Romàn had not been arrested. […]
If she had gone on taking happiness for granted. Living with
Romàn had been like walking along a winter street and arriving
in a field of warm poppies. If Romàn had not been broken in a
labour camp. If Irina had not died –
(from Romàn I)

While she understands Volodya’s fear, she fears even more what might happen to her family if she defects. At Darwin airport she doesn’t want to make a decision: “If only/this government man would abduct her”. But of course he can’t.

We then watch them as their relationship falters, first during ASIO’s interrogation, and then the years of living together in Melbourne, officially in disguise but known nonetheless. (“The whole street knows they are Petrovs -/too many photos, too much publicity”).

While I’m not a Petrov expert, I’ve read enough to feel that Lebokowicz’s interpretation is authentic. She explores what happens when the political interferes with the personal; she recognises the pull of culture and the despair that losing one’s home can engender; and she sees that corruption is not confined to communism:

so when ASIO falsifies (No! Not falsifies –
amends, adjusts, even corrects) the documents
he brought from the Embassy – of course he assents
(from “Bones”)

Australian Women Writers ChallengeThese are wonderful, readable poems. They are poetic but, to quote Paul Hetherington’s goal, without “trickery” and “artificial obscurity”. The imagery is strong but clear. I particularly liked the way Lebkowicz varies and plays with form. None of it is rhymed, but there are sonnets, couplets, poems with multi-line stanzas but closing on a single dramatic line, and others. There are poems with short lines or terse rhythms, indicating action or stress, and poems with long lines conveying thoughts and reflections. There is also a shape-poem, “Torment”, in which the zigzag shape mirrors Dusya’s distress (“Her life is a staircase that switches directions”).

Like any good historical fiction – if a verse novel can be called that – you don’t need to know the history to understand the story told here. And like any good historical fiction writer, Lebkowicz has produced something that enables us to reconsider an historical event from another perspective and to understand the humanity below the surface of the facts. An excellent and moving read.

Lesley Lebkowicz
The Petrov poems
Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2013
95pp.
ISBN: 9781922080141

(Review copy supplied by Zeitgeist Media Group)

Bianca Nogrady, The end: The human experience of death (Review)

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Bianca Nogrady, The end book coverHave you thought about your death? About how and where you want to die? These are the questions Australian science journalist Bianca Nogrady asks us to consider in her recent book, The end: the human experience of death. I’m not a morbid person, but when Nogrady contacted me to ask whether I’d consider reviewing her book, The end, it didn’t take me long to say yes. Like Nogrady I did witness, a couple of years ago, something I would call “a (pretty) good death”. That I felt it was so, intrigued me. I was therefore interested to read what Nogrady had to say.

And what she had to say was fascinating from beginning to end. In her introduction, she says:

This book could just as easily have been Everything you wanted to know about death but were afraid to ask. Death is fascinating, compelling, and it consists of much more than simply the end of a biological life-form. In seeking to understand death, we are seeking to understand life.

The rest of the book is structured logically according to the sorts of topics we are likely to ask about, starting with why we die, and then moving on to issues like defining death, where, when and how we die, spiritual and out-of-body experiences, and religion. Nogrady looks at these issues from all the likely points of view –  medical, sociological, psychological, philosophical, legal and ethical. She organises her information well, and the chapters (and subchapters) flow very naturally from each other.

So far, I have probably made it sound like a well-organised rather dry read – but that’s not how it is. Not only did Nogrady do a lot of secondary research (as the Notes at the end attest) but she also interviewed a lot of people. As a result, the formal information garnered from her research is supported by people’s stories, which also add colour and life to the facts. Many are of course sad – we are talking death after all – but this is not a sad book.

The most complicated section of the book is the second chapter on “Defining Death”. Nogrady takes us carefully through the different “definitions” – specifically, cardiac death and brain death (which, I learnt, can be further subdivided into “whole brain death” and “brain stem death”). She shows how the definition issue has been complicated by medical advances enabling us to keep the body alive and, of course, by the organ transplant process. Royal North Shore Hospital’s Intensive Care Specialist Dr Ray Raper suggests that death is:

a continuum; a graded box with one end as ‘being alive’ and the other end as ‘being dead’ … If you look at the domains of the transition between life and death, they’re spiritual, functional and structural and they’re biological, and the most important ones are the functional ones.

Death, in other words, is a process. If your fingernails are still growing when you are in the coffin, then, says Arizona State University Professor of Philosophy Joan McGregor, the questions needing answers relate to what are we preserving and why do we value it. I’ll leave this discussion here because there is no single solution – or not at present anyhow. This is murky ground indeed, but Nogrady manages to traverse it with clarity. I will probably have to read the book a few times though for the concepts to stick!

She also discusses euthanasia, teasing out misconceptions. She explains the differences between physician-assisted suicide, voluntary euthanasia and terminal sedation. She also explores the rise in palliative care as a profession, covering related issues like death doulas and volunteer workers in palliative care hospitals (or hospices). And of course she talks about near-death experiences, and those death-time phenomena that science can’t explain such as clocks stopping, machines behaving erratically, and deathbed visions.  The final chapter discusses faith and belief. Death is cultural, but, as she discovered, there is as much similarity as there are differences in end-of-life rituals.

It’s a funny thing to say, I suppose, but this is an enjoyable book. It’s neither superficial nor so detailed that you get bogged down. There is a lovely balance between expert opinions and anecdotes. I can imagine reading it again – or parts of it. It’s a shame, though, that there isn’t an index, which seems to be common in non-fiction books aimed at a general market. I guess it’s all about cost.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeIn her epilogue, Nogrady returns to her own experience, to how the death of her grandmother had caused her to want to better understand death. Writing the book, she says, made her think about “the value of planning, or at least thinking about how we want to die”. Death is, after all, a “one-way journey”. We do it alone, and it may well be, she argues, our best chance “find out who we are at the core”. One man who spent a long time thinking about his death, because he had a degenerative, terminal disease, was Australian public intellectual Donald Horne whose last book, written with his wife Myfanwy, was Dying: A memoir. He wrote:

My final drifting away, via a morphine dose, I would want to be among my memories, with Myfanwy whom I love holding my hand.

Think about your death, plan for it, is Nogrady’s final message to us. If you’re ready to take up her challenge, The end would be a good place to start.

Bianca Nogrady
The end: The human experience of death
North Sydney: Vintage Books, 2013
260pp
ISBN: 9781742752051

(Review copy supplied by the author)

Murray Bail, The voyage (Review)

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Murray Bail, The voyage, book cover

Courtesy: Text Publishing

It took me a while to read Murray Bail‘s latest novel The voyage. I started it before we went overseas but didn’t quite finish it, and decided not to carry it with me. So, 8 weeks later, I picked it up and found it surprisingly easy to continue. I say surprising because it is a rather astonishing novel – in style, structure, and also, I think, theme. Like other works of Bail’s, particularly Eucalyptus, it manages to feel old and new at the same time, which is rather the point, since it shifts back and forth between the Old World (Europe) and the New (Australia), between high society Vienna and a cargo ship returning to Australia with piano inventor Delage and escapee from the Old World, Elisabeth von Schalla, on board.

It’s a short book, just 200 pages, but it’s by no means simple. Short books, I’ve found, often demand the most of their readers. Anyhow, Bail, you may remember, gave the opening keynote address at the National Library of Australia’s Writing the Australian Landscape conference. It was a provocative talk, but I won’t reiterate what I’ve said before. Instead I want to refer to his plea for writers to take stylistic and intellectual risks. This is what Bail has done here.  There’s a Patrick White-like intensity, but the style is all Bail.

First though, as usual, a few words about the plot. The story concerns 46-year-old piano-inventor Frank Delage coming to Europe – specifically Vienna – to sell his new Delage piano. It’s a cheeky thing to do, this, but he gives it a go with a certain naiveté perhaps that comes with being from the New World. He meets the Schalla family, first the mother Amelia von Schalla and then the husband, Konrad, and their 36-year-old daughter Elisabeth. There are two main plot tensions – will he sell his piano, and what will happen between him and the two “landlocked women”. The piano plot is resolved clearly (though not necessarily neatly) while the relationship plot is not so clean, even though early in the novel we know that Elisabeth is on the boat with him going to Australia.

Now to the risky business. This is a novel with no chapters, and it mostly comprises long paragraphs that last several pages. These are somewhat unusual, though not particularly risky. The chronology alternates between Delage’s time in Vienna and his voyage home on the ship, with occasional flashbacks to Australia. This sort of narrative structure isn’t unusual these days either. But, what is unusual, what is risky, is how he alternates his chronology. It is done organically, fluidly, mid-paragraph and even – sometimes – mid-sentence. For example, the following sentence starts in the present, on the ship, with the subject being two of the passengers, and then shifts back to Amalia in Vienna. The next sentence returns to the ship, but now with Elisabeth:

Now the sisters faced the sun, closing their eyes, allowing the warmth to soften their thoughts, the older, forsaken one undoing the top buttons of her blouse to extend the tan, after first rubbing cream into her feet and throat, the buttons on Amalia’s, pleated, high-collar blouse he found to be imitation buttons, decoration only, on her back well-hidden by the Italian pleating, which gave the impression of vertical stripes was a tiny zipper of unexpected elegance. For Elisabeth, it was too hot on the small deck, she went back to the cabin, favouring an Austrian complexion over acquiring a tan … (p. 142)

Bail, it seems, loves the comma! It looks tricky to read: if you try to analyse a sentence or paragraph, it defeats you, the syntax is odd. And yet, it flows seamlessly from place to place, character to character, idea to idea. It is artful, carefully composed, but reads naturally, surprisingly so.

The important question, however, is how does this style relate to the theme? And here I’d like to return to Bail’s address. He spoke of Australians not being sure of who we are. We have a thin layer of history, he said, by contrast with the Old World and its long, albeit often grim history. “What is bad for a country can be good for art”, he proposed. Oh dear, I’m not sure we want to generate a few revolutions or civil wars for ourselves just to give artists something to chew on! He also said that “I hadn’t quite realised my novels are centred around journeys … My people are instinctively hot-footing it out of here, turning away from the apparent barrenness.” Bail senses a continuing discomfort about the New World’s “place”, which is articulated by Delage: “It goes without saying that they [the Viennese] would stick their noses up in the air at an intruder, a concert grand made in a hopeless backward place, Australia”.

And so, in The voyage, we have a dialogue between Old and New, which is mirrored in the style. Bail sees a tension between respecting the old and encouraging or supporting the new, between certainty and uncertainty, between world-weariness and naivete. I was initially surprised. Surely we have resolved our identity crisis; surely Old World-New World discussions are old hat. But he has a point. The Old World does, whether it’s justified or not, seem sure of itself in a way that we aren’t – “the old buildings, industrial, older than anything in Sydney or at least different, carved stonework above the windows and doors, left him feeling out of place”. It’s natural to feel out-of-place in a different culture, but there’s something else going on here too – and it’s regarding the fact that we Australians often feel lesser, and apologise even, for the fact that we, as exemplified by our buildings, are new. You hear it all the time – the awe and admiration – from Australians travelling overseas. And yet, our land is older, and indigenous Australian culture is probably the oldest continuous culture in the world. No wonder indigenous writers like Jeanine Leane get a little fired up!

Anyhow, Bail explores this tension through Delage’s attempts to sell his New World piano to the Old World, and his triangular relationship with the von Schalla mother and daughter. What happens to his piano – who buys it, how it is used – provides a biting comment on both New World and Old World pretensions. How the relationships develop is more nuanced and less resolved, leaving the way open for growth and change. Because, of course, the novel is not simply about Old World meets New World. It is about New in a much broader sense. It’s about “being open to the new”, in all fields of endeavour, whether this be piano manufacture, writing, the arts in general, or even the self. Indeed, at the book’s conclusion, Delage, who had earlier felt “without edges”,  senses that he has “become a slightly different person”.

For all this seriousness, though, The voyage is a quietly funny, satirical book. Bail delights in skewering self-importance and pomposity in critics, avant-garde artists, architects, and business men, to name a few of his targets. Women generally fare better. Viennese Amalia says she enjoys “the discomfort of the unexpected” and Elisabeth demonstrates that she does by joining Delage on his cargo ship.

I’ve laboured over this review as you can probably tell. I’ve rambled, and may not have made much sense. It’s a slippery novel that can be tackled from many angles and it doesn’t resolve all its tensions. This is good. I enjoyed the novel, but I suggest you ignore my review and read the book yourself. I’d love to know what you think.

Lisa (ANZLitLovers) has also reviewed the book, and enjoyed its inventiveness.

Murray Bail
The voyage
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012
200pp
ISBN: 978192192261

Dorothy Johnston, Eight pieces on prostitution (Review)

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Dorothy Johnston, Eight pieces on prostitution book cover

Lifted, with approval I hope, from Johnston’s website

A few months ago I wrote a Monday Musings on the Australian Society of Authors’ digital publishing initiative, Authors Unlimited e_Book portal. At the time I decided to try it out and bought Dorothy Johnston‘s collection of short stories, Eight pieces on prostitution.

The collection comprises 7 short stories and a long story or novella. One of the stories, ‘Mrs B’, I read earlier this year in Meanjin‘s Canberra edition. Some of the other stories have been published before too: ‘The Man Who Liked To Come With The News’ (The State of the Art, 1983), ‘Commuting’ (Island, issue 52, Spring 1992, and elsewhere), and ‘The Studio’ (Southerly, Winter 1996).

The first thing I should say about this collection is that it is not salacious reading. That is, it’s not erotica. Johnston’s interest is the lives, the experience, of prostitutes as people. Who are they? Why are they doing what they are doing? How do they negotiate their relationships, professional and personal? How do they live the life they’ve chosen and are they happy?

Johnston’s prostitutes are neither glamorous nor tarty, and most work for themselves or in small establishments. They are not the prostitutes of popular imagination. That is, they tend not to work in fancy parlours under control of a madam nor in that sleazy underworld borderland managed by pimps. They are, instead, either ordinary employees or small businesswomen. Some are career prostitutes, others are university students or single mothers who need to support themselves, while still others, like Eve in ‘The Studio’, are a little more mysterious:

She lives in a small flat. She chose the national capital because she imagined it to be a city where she could fade into the background, where she could hide.
Johnston’s characters are often wistful or even a little sad, but they are never pathetic. They are intelligent, and Johnston respects not judges them. They are not powerless, either, though sometimes the power they have is limited to their domain and can be tenuous. They can be a little lost, or perhaps just at a cross-roads in their lives. Maria in ‘The Cod-piece and the Diary Entry’ is uncertain about the world and her place in it. She thinks, when she moves and loses a client:
Looking back, she could not shake the feeling that she’s been on the point of understanding something important while in Harry’s company, that understanding had been no more than a breath away.
Sandy in ‘Names’ admires university student Gail’s strength and resilience:

She never let herself fall into a chair like I did when she came back from a client, slumping my stomach and letting the smile drop off my face.

There is a continuity between these characters and the three women in her novel The house at number 10 which I reviewed earlier this year. Like Elizabeth Jolley, Johnston is not afraid to re-use or develop characters across her oeuvre. I rather like that.

The pieces are set in places known to Johnston – Canberra and Melbourne. We get a clear sense of those cities, but even more we are let into the rooms the prostitutes inhabit – the ones they work in, the ones they relax in between clients. We learn about the things that are part of their daily routine. Sophie, for example, in ‘Commuting’, finds that when she steps outside work
petrol fumes are a relief after hours of perfumed towels and bubble bath.
The final piece is the novella ‘Where the Ladders Start’. The title comes from Yeats’ poem, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’:
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

It concerns a three-woman brothel established by Sue, who’d been dreaming for years of a “better system”. It’s “a co-operative … Tough that word, but they’d risen to its challenges”. Now though, the dream is being severely tested as they cope with the death of a client, on the first page, from erotic asphyxiation, “the choking game”.  The story explores the “one for all, all for one” ideal. Are there limits to trust, and how far should you take loyalty, particularly when it starts to be to your own detriment? Johnston sets the story at the beginning of the new millennium adding an ironic overlay to the situation confronting the women. What sort of millennium are they setting up for themselves by their response to the death?

As in all her stories, Johnston’s view of human nature here is warm but realistic, clear-eyed. She pits the “never let a chance go by” attitude against the desire to protect, care and trust, and then tests that against the need for self-preservation.

Johnston’s language is a delight to read. She’s precise but expressive, using imagery with a light touch:

The freedom to ask each other questions danced and shimmied in the air.

She can be quietly ironic:

Laura went on sitting in the kitchen like a Buddha, or more accurately a simpleton, a girl who’d left her mind someplace and forgotten to go back for it.

Is Laura simple or not is the question we ponder through most of the story.

In dealing with a mysterious death, “Where the Ladders Start” introduces us to that other string on Johnston’s writing bow, the crime novel. It’s a clever story, well-plotted, nicely maintaining a tension between mystery and clarity. Like most of the stories, there’s no simple resolution. Life, Johnston shows, is a messy business.

You’ve probably gathered by now that I thoroughly enjoyed this collection. While there is a commonality between the women, giving the collection a lovely coherence, there is also difference. Each character is unique, each story engaging. If there’s an overall theme, it is one of survival, or perhaps more accurately, resilience. Her women get on with life. They make decisions, some good, some bad, some we are not sure about, but, and here’s the important thing, they don’t stand still. Do read it. At $9.95, I reckon this is a steal.

Dorothy Johnston
Eight pieces on prostitution
Australian Society of Authors, 2013
202pp.
Availability: Online download for $9.95 from the ASA site

Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, The novel cure: An A-Z of literary remedies (Review)

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Novel Cure bookcover

Novel Cure (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

I don’t usually blog about books before I’ve read them cover to cover, but I’m making an exception for Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin‘s The novel cure because it’s one of those books that’s best read in small doses (no pun intended). You see, it is a book of bibliotherapy, a book that recommends novels to read to cure almost any ailment you can think of.

Bibliotherapy is described in Wikipedia, but I’ll give you Berthoud and Elderkin’s definition:

the prescribing of fiction for life’s ailments.

I don’t want to give away too many treatments. After all, the authors need to eat. But, to give you a taste, here is a sample of ailments and their prescribed treatments:

  • Daddy’s girl, being a: Can you guess the treatment? It’s Jane Austen’s Emma! You didn’t expect me not to start with Jane Austen did you? Emma, Berthoud and Elderkin say, “has been sent out into the world with an overly high opinion of herself and a self-centredness that can only bring her grief”. They suggest Emma should be seen as a cautionary tale and that girls at risk need to “stop playing the game and show him [their father] what a bad girl you can be”. “See: rails, going off the, for inspiration.” Are you getting the idea?
  • Control freak, being a: The authors suggest two Australian books. Is there something these two Englishwomen are trying to tell we colonials? Both are books I’ve reviewed here, Elizabeth Harrower’s dark The watch tower (my review) and Graeme Simsion‘s comic The Rosie project (my review).
  • Nose, hating your: What else could they suggest for this but Patrick Süskind‘s chilling Perfume. That’s a novel that’s not easy to forget. For all the horror of this novel, the authors manage to turn it to a positive purpose, one determined to help the self-esteem of those self-conscious about their noses!

As lighthearted as all this might sound, the authors do believe in the efficacy of literature to help ease (if not cure) both emotional and physical pain. They apparently hold highly successful bibliotherapy sessions and retreats in the UK. Among the ailments in the book is “Eating Disorder” and the two recommended books, Deborah Hautzig‘s Second star to the right and Jenefer Shute’s Life-size, are serious offerings for sufferers and their carers.

Like the good reference book it is, The novel cure includes see references (such as “Control, out of: See adolescence, alcoholism …”) and see also references (such as “Old age, horror of: See also amnesia, reading associated ….”). These helpful pointers warmed the cockles of my little librarian heart.

Scattered through the book are “Ten Best” lists, for which there is an index at the back so you can find them easily. One that made me laugh is “The Ten Best Novels For When You’ve Got A Cold”. As all Australians know, the best remedy for a cold is eucalyptus. It’s fitting then that Murray Bail‘s gorgeous novel Eucalyptus is top of the list.

There are two other indexes at the back of the book. One is the Index of Reading Ailments (for such life-threatening conditions as “Holiday, not knowing what novels to take on” and “Household chores, distracted by”). And the other is, of course, the Index of Novels and Authors. This makes the book useful for those of you who don’t have any ailments needing cure. You can  see if your favourite novels are cures for others.

You will also see, if you look at this index, the breadth and depth of authors and their works covered in this book. I was thrilled to see many Australian authors represented, covering more than a century of Australian literature. As far as I can tell, every continent is covered. The authors include, for example, South African Lauren Beukes, Indian Rahul Bhattacharya, French Albert Camus, Mexican Laura Esquivel, Japanese Haruki Murakami, Russian Leo Tolstoy, and so on. This index comprises eight two-column pages.

To conclude, I’ll offer my own ailment and cure: Reading slump, being in a: Read The novel cure. You’re sure to find a book or two to cure you and, if you don’t, well, you’ll be reading anyhow!

Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin
The novel cure: An A-Z of literary remedies
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013
Cover design: WH Chong
456pp.
ISBN: 9781922079350

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Ann Patchett, The bookshop strikes back (Review)

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I’m not normally an impulse buyer except, it seems, when I visit the bookshop at the National Library of Australia! I tell myself I’m not interested in little books – you know, the sort bookshops put on their sales counters – but somehow the National Library of Australia regularly manages to break down my resolution. Last year I reviewed Dorothy Porter‘s On passion which I bought from their counter. Today, I’m going to write about Ann Patchett‘s essay “The bookshop strikes back”.

My purchase went like this. I was standing at the counter a few days ago making my purchases when this tiny little 20-page off-white booklet caught my eye. I picked it up, and said to the bookseller, “This looks interesting”. “Oh yes”, she said, “we had them in for National Bookshop Day?” Well, I knew then what I had to do …

I’ve been trying to remember when I first heard that the book was dead, but I think it was back in the 1970s when it was argued that the easy availability of video would spell the end of reading. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same was said when movies appeared, when radio came on the scene, and so on. Surprisingly, though, books seem to survive! Except, it’s not surprising to us readers is it?

Books are facing a new challenge in our digital world – but, so far, the main issue seems to be more about the form of the book (as in print vs digital) than the survival of reading. However, bookshops do seem to be at risk. Ann Patchett suddenly found one day that her town, Nashville, Tennessee, no less, had no bookshops (other than a used bookshop and stores like Target). Apparently the last one to go – an independent that had been bought out by a chain – had been profitable “but not profitable enough”. Patchett’s discovery, albeit on a smaller scale, replicates the situation at my local mall, which is one of my city’s main shopping centres. Fortunately, though, we do have some great bookshops in other parts of the city.

Patchett doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing the whys, though the prevailing view seems to be that the combination of online bookselling giants like Amazon and the rise of e-books are causing the demise of bookshops – both chain stores and the independents. But, Ann Patchett believes things may be changing. She writes:

… all things happen in a cycle, I explained – the little bookstore had succeeded and grown into a bigger bookstore.  Seeing the potential for profit, chains rose up and crushed the independents, then Amazon rose up and crushed the superstore chains. Now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us, we realised what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction, the recommendation of a smart reader than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had purchased.

This may be a little simplistic but history does have a habit of repeating itself doesn’t it! So Patchett, who was later “dizzied by the blitheness that stood in place of any business sense”, established, with two other women,  a new independent bookshop in Nashville … and found that on book tours for her most recent book, State of wonder, interviewers were more interested in asking her about her bookshop plans than about her book. She laughs that on the day the bookshop opened in November 2011, the New York Times ran a story with a picture of her on page A1, something that her agent and publisher would never expect to achieve on the basis of her role as a literary novelist.

This is not a highly analytical essay, but it’s a lovely read about the love of books and bookshops. It provides a nice contrast to the fascinating but ultimately sad story of a bookshop I read a few years ago – Annette Freeman’s semi-self-published Tea in the library. Freeman, like many booklovers, dreamed of having a bookshop – one in which readers could come, buy books, stay for a cuppa, and meet authors. She had a lovely vision, but it failed after a couple of years, something she explores openly and honestly in her book.

For Patchett though, so far so good. She’s not sure why they’ve been successful but she says

my luck has made me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible.

I hope she’s right – but I guess for her to be so, we need more brave (or blithe) booksellers and more readers who want the personal touch, because, after all, we are in this together.

Ann Patchett
“The bookshop strikes back”
London: Bloomsbury, 2013
20pp
ISBN: 9781408847497
Originally published in Atlantic Monthly, November 2012
To appear in This is the story of a happy marriage (Bloomsbury, later 2013)
Available: Online at Atlantic Monthly

Romy Ash, The basin (Review)

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Romy Ash has made quite a splash with her debut novel, Floundering. It was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, among others. I  haven’t read it yet, but I have read a couple of her short stories that have appeared in the Griffth Review, one of which is “The basin”.

Lake Argyle

A tiny section of Lake Argyle

For those who don’t know, the Griffith Review is published quarterly, with each issue focusing on a particular theme. The issue “The basin” appears in is titled “What is Australia” which is rather apposite given my Monday Musings post this week on Writing the Australian landscape. Ash doesn’t identify the “place” in which the story is set, beyond telling us that there’s a dam which is described in a pamphlet as “the biggest inland body of water in Australia”. Well, that gives it away. It is clearly inspired by Lake Argyle in the Kimberley region of northern Australia. The lake – an artificial one created by damming the Ord River – is huge. I’ve never seen a lake (in Australia anyhow) quite like it.

Ash’s story is about Jess who has come to the region with her husband, Max, and their daughter, Frankie. Jess is not happy, something that is physically represented by her increasing weight: “every bit of her wobbled”, “Sitting there Jess felt fatter”, “her thighs rubbed together”, and so on. “You were skinny, before”, an old farmer tells her.

Max, however, is happy. “We’ve never done so well”, he tells her. But all is not well in this man-made Eden (there are sly references to “apples”) and not all men are happy. It’s not normal for this “dry country” to have so much water. A farmer tells them:

The most beautiful country you’ve ever seen, gone. Them gums, they’re drowned under there. Ever heard a gum drown?  They creak. All the animals. It’s not like fire – them animals can’t sense it coming – they was drowned, sure enough. The surface of the water was just insects. Snakes curled and died. They washed up at the sides. It didn’t look like it does now. It was putrid.

Putrid perhaps, but natural is the implication. I have written about the drowning of this landscape before in my post on Mary Durack’s poem “Lament for a drowned country”. The Duracks’ own homestead was drowned to create Lake Argyle.

Australian Women Writers ChallengeAsh uses feminising imagery to tell her story – with many references to the colour “pink” (galahs, inside of mouths, sunrise, hams) and to the “basin” of the title. Water, often a literary device associated with life, is a complex image in Ash’s story. People are told not to swim in the dam because it’s the town water. Jess and Frankie do, but then Jess will only drink bottled water, refusing to drink the town water. Understandably! A different sort of water features in the story’s resolution.

Although Ash doesn’t explore it, she reminds us of indigenous people’s association with the land when she says that “after the flooding the town had been renamed Burrngburrng-nga, an Indigenous name. Every time she heard someone say it they pronounced it differently and quietly, unsure.” Google tells me that it means “The water boiled” in the Wagiman language (from Katherine in the Northern Territory).

This is a story about the costs – personal and environmental – of mankind’s belief in its ability to control nature. It’s about values, and whether making money is enough to sustain happiness. It’s about the unhappiness that can result when people are dislocated from their roots – either because they move or because their place has been changed beyond recognition. Place – it has such a complex relationship with our physical, emotional and/or spiritual well-being, doesn’t it?

It’s not a particularly dramatic story, but it is a quietly effective one that I can see fitting nicely into a volume intended to encourage us to think about “What is Australia”.

Romy Ash
“The basin”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 36, Winter 2012
Available: Online at the Griffith Review

Michelle de Kretser, Questions of travel (Review)

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Hardback cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Hardback cover (Courtesy: Allen & Unwin)

Every now and then a book comes along that is so sweeping in its conception, that it almost defies review. Such a book is this year’s Miles Franklin Award winner, Questions of travel by Michelle de Kretser. Consequently, I’m going to focus on one aspect that particularly spoke to me – and that is her exploration of place and its meaning/s in contemporary society.

“Soon everyone will be a tourist”

As the title suggests, the novel is about travel – but travel in its widest sense. In fact, without being too corny, it is, really, about the journey of life. As our heroine Laura, thinking about her married lover Paul, ponders:

Perhaps she was an item on the checklist: the wild oats of Europe, the career back home, marriage, mortgage, fatherhood, adultery, the mandatory stopping places on the Ordinary Aussie Grand Tour, with renos*, divorce and a coronary to follow.

That made me splutter in my coffee …

First, though, a brief overview of the plot. The story is told chronologically, alternating between the Australian Laura and Sri Lankan Ravi. Both were born in the 1960s, and the novel chronicles their lives until 2004 when they’d be around 40. Laura, under-appreciated by her family (cruelly described by her father as “the runt of the bunch”) and aimless, travels the world before returning to Sydney in her mid-30s, still rather directionless, but now an experienced freelance travel-writer. Ravi grows up in Sri Lanka, marries and has a son, but a shocking event results in his coming to Australia in 2000 as an asylum-seeker, the same year that Laura returns. You might think at this point that you know where the novel is heading, but you’ll be getting no spoilers from me!

And so we have two significant types of traveller – the tourist (with some business travel thrown in) and the refugee/emigrant. De Kretser explores these comprehensively, and with, I must say, thrilling insight. Thrilling is an unusual word in this context, I suppose, but I can’t think of a better one to describe my reaction to the way de Kretser, point-by-point, unpicks the world of travel, skewering all sorts of assumptions, expectations and pretensions as she goes. I almost got to the point of cancelling my next overseas trip! After all, as Laura discovers, “to be a tourist was always too arrive too late”. How many times have you been told that x place was better in the 80s, only to remember that in the 80s you were told it was better in the 60s!

“Geography is destiny”

So Ravi is told by his teacher Brother Ignatius. This, for all the serious and satirical exploration of travel and tourism, is what the book means most to me. Brother Ignatius tells his students that “History is only a byproduct of geography”. While we could all have fun exploring a chicken-and-the-egg argument, I’d find it hard to deny its fundamental truth.

Laura spends most of the book travelling, or thinking and writing about travel. She’s the quintessential modern person, believing:

What was the modern age if not movement, travel, change?

Living in England she sees the long-standing connections people have to their place, while

Her own people struck Laura, by comparison, as a vigorous, shallow-rooted plant still adapting itself to alien soil.

She returns to Australia, following the death of the gay man she’d loved, hoping for meaning, connection. Geography, place, home had asserted itself … as it usually does. But life doesn’t prove to be much easier. Struggling to find her place, she finds once again that “noone was asking her to stay”.

Meanwhile, Ravi struggles to adjust to his circumstances. Grieving for what he’s lost, he (with his “eyes that had peered into hell”) goes through the motions of living and working. People such as his landlady and her family, and his work colleagues, are kind – enough – but de Kretser shows how skin-deep, how superficial, our practice of diversity and, worse, our humanity is. We do not easily accept people from “other” places. “Otherness”, de Kretser proves, “is readily opaque”. Australians, for example, ask Ravi which detention centre he’d been in because, of course, as an asylum-seeker that’s where he’d been! And, if he hadn’t, was he a “real” refugee. (One of the book’s many other themes, in fact, is “authenticity”.) Ravi, it has to be said, doesn’t help himself. He doesn’t share his history (should he have to?) and, fearing obligations, he resists any help that isn’t essential.

“Place had come undone”

While Laura and Ravi struggle with where they are, they also confront the fact that by the late twentieth century place isn’t only physical. Ravi had discovered, back in Sri Lanka, the world of “disembodied travel”, though his wife Malini had proclaimed “Bodies are always local”. This imagery, seemingly light at the time, carries a heavy weight. Later, finding settling into his new geographical location difficult, Ravi starts to find escape and even solace in virtual places, including visiting people’s homes via real estate sites. De Kretser doesn’t miss any opportunity to explore the ways we “travel” and it never feels forced. It all fits, emulating the way travel fits into our lives.

For Laura, the virtual intrudes mostly through work where she is a commissioning editor for Ramsays, a travel guide company. As the 21st century takes hold, the e-zone division of her company starts to increase in importance. Some of the novel’s best satire is found in the portrayal of corporate culture at Ramsays. It’s laugh-out-loud, sometimes excruciatingly so.

“Time was a magician, it always had something improbable up its sleeve …”

While the novel’s subject matter is travel, in all its guises and in what it says about how we relate to place and each other, the overriding theme is that literal and existential question, What Am I Doing Here? It tackles the big issues that confront us all every day – Time, Truth, Memory, Death and, of course, the most fraught of all, Other People.

Towards the end of the novel, Laura realises that:

… the moment that mattered on each journey resisted explanation … because it addressed only the individual heart.

We could say the same about a great book … and so I apologise for my paltry attempt here to explain de Kretser’s witty, warm and powerful novel. If you have any interest in contemporary literature and its take on modern living, this is the book for you.

For an equally positive perspective, check out Lisa’s (ANZLitLovers) excellent review.

Michelle de Kretser
Questions of travel
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012
517pp
ISBN: 9781743317334

* Aussies commonly abbreviate words with “o” or “ie” endings. “Renos” therefore refers to “renovations”.

Anita Heiss, Am I black enough for you (Review)

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Anita Heiss, Am I black enough for you?

Courtesy: Random House

Anita Heiss‘s Am I black enough for you? is a challenge to categorise, so I’ll start with writer Benjamin Law‘s description on the cover of my edition. He calls it “part family history, part manifesto” to which I’d add “part memoir” because “family history” does not really cover the self-description aspect of the book.

For those of you who don’t know Anita Heiss, she is a Wiradjuri woman and an activist for indigenous Australians. She has a PhD in Communication and Media, focusing on Aboriginal literature and publishing, and is a writer. (I reviewed her chicklit novel, Paris dreaming, earlier this year, and reported last year on her address to the inaugural Canberra Readers’ Festival.) She co-edited the Macquarie PEN anthology of Aboriginal literature and was the guiding force behind BlackWords (the subject of this week’s Monday Musings). And this is just the start … she has been, or is currently, on many boards and committees, particularly to do with indigenous people and communications. She is an Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. She is, in effect, a tall poppy … which brings me to Am I black enough for you?

You see, in 2009, one of Australia’s influential shock jocks, Andrew Bolt, wrote a post titled “It’s so hip to be black” on his blog, asking readers to accept his proposition that there is “a whole new fashion in academia, the arts and professional activism to identify as Aboriginal”. He named many people, including Anita Heiss, calling them “white” or “political” Aborigines. His facts were questionable and his language emotive – such as “madness”, “trivial inflections of race”, “comic”. His argument was that these “white” Aborigines were obtaining unfair benefits from their decision to “be black”. The result was a court case brought by Anita Heiss and eight others against Bolt and his employer, The Herald and Weekly Times, for breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. Heiss and her co-defendants won the case. They did not seek damages. It was ground-breaking stuff that brought out some good discussion about the nexus between racism and free speech, about rights and responsibilities, but it also generated a lot of vituperative commentary. You can research all this pretty easily on the ‘net.

This is the background to Am I black enough for you? which, you might now have gathered, could also be described as an “identity memoir”. On the publisher’s website, Heiss writes that “I wanted to demonstrate that we as Aboriginal people have our own forms of self-identification and self-representation”. She wanted to “challenge the stereotypes” and present “alternative realities of being Aboriginal today”. This she does very well.

Heiss opens the book with her family background, Wiradjuri mother and immigrant Austrian father. She describes herself:

I’m an urban beachside Blackfella, a concrete Koori with Westfield Dreaming, and I apologise to no-one.

This is my story: it is a story about not being from the desert, not speaking my traditional language and not wearing ochre …

In the first four chapters of the book, she tells of her background – her grandmother and mother and their experiences as indigenous women, her father and his values, and her school days. Having laid that foundation, she presents in the fifth chapter, the current working definition of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person used by the Federal Government:

An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he “or she” lives.

That seems pretty tight to me, though no definition is perfect. It’s better than using “a caste system defined by blood quantum (half-caste … quadroon)”.

There are a lot of “ah-so” moments for me in the book – some confirming things I’d already believed and some raising my consciousness about how easy it is to say the wrong thing without being aware of it. Heiss chronicles many instances where (mostly, I think) well-meaning whitefellas seem to get it wrong, such as the non-indigenous academics who proclaim themselves experts in “everything Aboriginal” or the critic who argued that Aboriginal literature “must” be in traditional language otherwise it’s Australian literature. It’s good to have these ideas aired publicly. It helps us test our own conceptions.

Am I black enough for you? has, like most of Heiss’s writing, a strong political and educational purpose. She is on a mission to encourage both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians to think about indigenous identity and, further, about how we relate to each other. She therefore writes in a bright, breezy, accessible style. She’s acutely aware of the power of words and language to define and to obfuscate (though she wouldn’t use such an obfuscatory word!), and frequently discusses language in the book. She makes a particular point about this in the chapter on her academic life, “Epista-what?”, when she says that using academic language, particularly to discuss indigenous issues, served “largely to alienate the very people it was talking about.”

There is much more in this book, and I hope many Australians read it. It’s well-structured, more or less chronologically but in a way that aligns with various themes – academia, the role of literature, her writing, gender – all of which link back to affirming indigenous people’s identity. She comes across as a generous woman – in her relationships with indigenous and non-indigenous people alike. She believes that optimism, rather than negativity and anger, is more likely to get results. It is possibly this optimism which underlies my small frustration with the book: several times she hints at dark times and stresses but, being the optimist, she focuses more on her strategies for overcoming them than on how they have informed her being. I’d like to understand more of that. However, Am I black enough for you? is not a misery memoir, and that’s probably a good thing!

Australian Women Writers ChallengeRead for the Australian Women Writers’ Challenge 2013,  ANZLitLovers Indigenous Writers Week, and Global Women of Color. Lisa (ANZLitLovers) and Marilyn (Me, You and Books) both enjoyed the book.

Anita Heiss
Am I black enough for you?
Sydney: Bantam, 2012
346pp.
ISBN: 9781742751924

Melissa Lucashenko, How green is my valley (Review)

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Almost a year ago I reviewed a short story, “The silent majority”, by Melissa Lucashenko. It was published in the Griffith Review of November 2009. I enjoyed the story and so, in honour of NAIDOC Week and ANZLitLovers Indigenous Literature Week, I thought I’d review another of her Griffith Review contributions. This one, “How green is my valley”, is described as a memoir, and was published in Winter 2006.

I love how Lucashenko, with her dual Aboriginal and European heritage, traverses both in her writing. She commences “The silent majority” with the famous opening words of Pride and prejudice – “”It is a truth universally acknowledged”. The title of this piece immediately brings to mind Richard Llewellyn‘s classic novel How green was my valley, and clues us into her themes: beauty under threat, complicated relationships with land, and the precarious balances involved in maintaining it.

Lucashenko starts her memoir – though, really, I’d call it a personal essay – with a Mark Twain quote, which has a prescience now that he could not have guessed:

Everybody talks about the weather/but nobody does anything about it.

She then describes the experience of torrential rain in Bundjalung country, the coastal regions of north-east New South Wales/southeast Queensland. She’s moved, she says, to “one of Australia’s wettest shires”. The first half of the essay describes how residents manage – or don’t – the rain. She talks of students being let off school, of the weather not distinguishing between rich and poor, and of how community is fostered as people with 4WDs deliver food to the stranded who don’t. “The information we receive from land”, she says, “is tightly nuanced”. Farmers watch closely and know how the days will pan out once the rain sets in:

We who live on Bundjalung land know that eventually the rain will stop, the mould will retreat and the mud will dry. Whatever climate change is going to mean for our kids, in the short term life for us will return to normal.

Then, halfway through the essay, comes the sting in the tail: she reminds us that the inhabitants of Tuvalu will lose their home in the next few decades as their island is submerged, and the semi-traditional hunting lifestyle of the Inuit of the Arctic Circle “will be shattered by global warming even sooner”. She wonders whether indigenous people like the Inuit will be able to translate “the clan, the traditions of egalitarianism, stoicism and intensely valued community, to life in suburbs and towns.”

Lucashenko’s thesis is that it can be done, that it is possible to be “bicultural”, to span the chasm “between industrial and indigenous views of the ‘good life’ and what constitutes a proper society”. She argues that the egalitarian ethic espoused by Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson –

the traditions of mateship that faithfully mimic the brotherhood of initiated Aboriginal men and the myriad skills of surviving from and maintaining the land – were learned by some colonial whites from Aboriginal people.

Hmm … I haven’t heard that before. I suspect Australia’s mateship tradition has rather multi-pronged origins but this could certainly be part of it.

Lucashenko’s point though is to draw a parallel between white Australians’ love of land and indigenous people’s. She says that any Australian who has holidayed at the same beach every summer, or “diligently looked after” their own little patch, has “walked in Aboriginal footsteps” whether they know it or not. Hmmm … again I think this is a little bit of a long bow, in the sense that there are people all over the world who love their bit of land. But it doesn’t spoil her argument that it would have been good had the influence of Aboriginal knowledge and practice been greater, because then

More Australians might have learned not just to love the place (as some indisputably do) but to listen to the land more seriously. Had more Aboriginal philosophers been valued rather than shot or packed off to missions, all Australians might have learned the careful and intense attention to detail that many of us in the valley are still forced to practise as a matter of course.

With climate change breathing down our necks, will we all “be rooned”, she asks (alluding to one of my favourite old ballads “Said Hanrahan“). Will our “valley” be destroyed by our inability to tame our capitalistic consumerist urges, or will we learn in time how to be true custodians of our land?

Melissa Lucashenko
“How green is my valley”
Published in the Griffith Review, Edition 12, Winter 2006
Available: Online at the Griffith Review